Monday, January 03, 2022

To The North by Elizabeth Bowen (5)

 CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/879-2/

All my reviews of Bowen novels will be linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/elizabeth-bowens-novels/

All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/

My gestalt real-time review will be conducted in the comment stream below:

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9 thoughts on “Part Five of my review of ’To The North’ by Elizabeth Bowen

  1. XXI

    “‘I can’t imagine myself without you,’ said Emmeline. So they shelved America. It did strike Cecilia a moment that the idea of Emmeline’s imagining herself in any way, even to seeing her own shadow, was quite a new one. For she spoke of herself so little, as though she did not exist.”

    A chapter as important as it is unimportant in a concomitant way. This being a crucial chapter in Bowen’s canon, one of decorative but vanishable objects and gift shop paraphernalia. Seen by Emmeline in the light or shadow of Markie, including his views on women’s careers. Almost a substance by default —

    —as she returns from the Paris trip to find Lewis has rid the firm of Tripp!

    “The little white house pale with dusk, with rain streaming down its windows, was friendly tonight; here day-to-day life presented itself in mild outline and, after Paris, in delicate low-relief. She longed to inhabit with Markie the heart of the country, inaccessible, green and quiet, where telephones were not and lovers’ meetings meant journeys. If they were to be little together they must be calmly apart.”

    “Emmeline went to bed early; Cecilia read for a little and looked through her letters, staying to watch the fire die down. Restless, she crept up at midnight, tapped softly, and opened Emmeline’s door an inch. She heard rain on the window, the clock ticking, an unstirring silence about the bed … Sitting up by her shaded lamp Cecilia wrote, later, to Julian: ‘Emmeline’s home tonight; she is tired and doesn’t say much but seems quite happy: I regret, rather, anything that I said. Forget what I said: I don’t think I was anxious really. She says it was hot in Paris – think of heat while we were at Farraways! – She had a nice week-end and quite liked her Serbs. So what a pair of old women we were! […]
    This morning, Pauline and I went out riding; she fell off but seemed to enjoy herself. She seems anxious to be affectionate, but can find no one she really likes. Though I always feel …’ She wandered on, concluding: ‘I may not post this,’ and she did not. Her desk was full of such letters addressed to such friends, even stamped. Wondering if they would be posted if she were dead, she did not destroy them.”

    Unlike with spilt ink upon paper, one cannot destroy emails by retroactivity today amid the ‘moving dangerously’ fast of the Internet. But all is still subject to a Zeno Paradox, nevertheless? An intensely rainy London and an impending war that remind me of today’s recent lockdowns, lockdowns still possible, even now, in the ever-faraway post-omnicron’s near-future….

    “However assiduous the umbrella or kind the unrolled carpet, thousands of pairs of pale slippers must have been spoilt that summer. […]
    Across the mind’s surface – on which a world’s apprehension, strain at home and in Europe, were gravely written – the sense of a spoilt summer, so much prettiness wasted, darkly spread like spilt ink. Streets were to be navigated and parks desolate, pleasure-boats under tarpaulin and bands silent: the whole city became a mesh of unwilling hurry where nobody smiled or lingered. Unknown, the moon diminished; wasting itself upon vapours the sun smiled on.” [My bold]

    The band in the park did eventually break out again later in the Heat of the Day, though…

    But Lewis and Emmeline exploited the sticky situation at home with their ‘moving dangerously’ firm shipping people out from the rain elsewhere into the sun, a shifting by impossible flight, a feat that later becomes impossible in our own times through covid….

    “The Summer Rush meant little to Markie, who rushed nowhere in summer: when she was late he was not patient. The more he possessed of Emmeline, the more he became exacting. The question of marriage, however, was not re-opened between them.”

    The only real way to waste time, meantime, positively has been, during my own lockdowns, to sift Bowen’s canon — story by story, chapter by chapter, even increasingly if more intensely word by word…

    “She could only conclude that he felt time wasted at all had better be wasted thoroughly, and to this end put a pretty high value upon fatuity.“

    “…then they both dissipated and hung in the air. But still something restlessly ate up the air, like a flame burning.”

  2. XXII

    “High or low, drifting over the hours, iridescent or darker passing a shadow, she saw their happiness like an immortal bubble, touching a moment objects it seemed to enclose …”

    That Null Immortalis…

    “‘Nothing goes on,’ she said. ‘We grow old and don’t care, then we die: I don’t think it matters…”

    A rarefied chapter as a post-Paris portrait of Markie and Emmeline, including her ability to turn a jewellery shop out with its range of pearl necklaces for her to choose from and, after much ado, leaving the shop with the chosen necklace, while saying – but I never wear pearls!
    I feel likewise in scouring Bowen.

    “Here figures cast unknown shadows;”

    Through oblique glances of dialogue, that nobody would have spoken, we can choose those most important to represent the reluctant gestalt of the M.E. Syndrome. Him as an insurance company or a tall toppling tower, one who cannot live at the top of the Alps, and she a silently pent up volcano, I infer, a matched and unmatched couple that can only exist among the impossible choices of a hat shop called At El Bow’s

    “…her unconsciousness still had him wholly at its command. […]
    …his fingers exploring the arm and shoulder so sensitive to his touch – if she ever could be. […]
    ….facing her round to him, held by the elbows, so close… […]
    Tightening his grip on her elbows, he went on: ‘We do disagree.’
    ‘About everything, yes – stop, Markie, you’re hurting me rather – I don’t think that matters.’”

    “While her passivity soothed him, an exaltation at all times latent in her regard and, so great a part of her passion, likely to spring out at any time, alarmed, irked and often fatigued him.”

    “While her passivity soothed him, an exaltation at all times latent in her regard and, so great a part of her passion, likely to spring out at any time, alarmed, irked and often fatigued him. […] Innocence walks with violence; violence is innocent, cold as fate; between the mistress’s kiss and the blade’s is a hairsbreadth only, and no disparity; every door leads to death … The curtain comes down, the book closes – but who is to say that this is not so.”

  3. “; his name was Frank and he felt rather shy and masculine.”
    
Frank, you must read here about Frank, the most major minor-character ever…
    From earlier in this review.

    XXIII

    “Someone suspiciously like Tim Farquharson, with a young woman in scarlet, slipped out by another door as they came in.”

    And like Tim, Frank also appears in this chapter, but not even in person, but just as a name mentioned by Gerda to Lady W to stir the latter’s attention towards her, but, instead, evoking more Gilbert business in Lady W’s busy manipulative brain, when she takes Gerda to see pictures painted by an artist she, Lady W, knew. And this chapter also has aide-memoires about other minor characters and their accoutrements, like Julian’s sister Mrs Dolman (her husband into gas) and the lift between the floors. 

    But above all this chapter is. an “empty hour” when Julian and Emmeline stumble on each other in the house where she lives with Cecilia, thus reminding us of their erstwhile, and Cecilia’s, rhombus or square with Markie and with each other, and much about the tensions going on within it, and its overwhelming subtleties. OVERWHELMING SUBTLETIES, yes, if that is not a contradiction in terms, deployed disarmingly from Bowen’s head into mine via daily co-vivid dreams co-opted into and from.

    Emmeline’s duties, too, to her agency or bureau with a man called Lewis, the strictures of its new secretary and whether she should travel properly instead of staying nearer to home with another famous minor character called Connie Pleach!

    “Gerda’s shares with her patroness, just at the moment, seemed rather low: having heard much too much of Cecilia she could not help introducing the subject of Frank. This was a success: Lady Waters, looking into her deeply, said she must put Frank right out of her mind, at least for the present.
    ‘But he is so sympathetic.’
    ‘I liked Frank,’ said Lady Waters. ‘But men who are sympathetic are not, alas, always dependable. Julian Tower seems sympathetic but I do not think he is treating Cecilia at all well.’”

    “…she felt bound to remind Gerda that her and Gilbert’s relationship was not to each other alone; it was triangular – or, recollecting the number of babies – more strictly, square.”

    Emmeline and Julian, meantime….

    “She still believed herself happy; untouchable resolution showed even in her lassitude like a mountain-top on a too clear sky.”

    Cf Markie’s Alps in the previous chapter.

    “But Julian’s was impure: horrified reason played too great a part in it; he could not pack Markie – engaging, rational, witty, intensely social – into the box of one idea and run a sword through. He was not disinterested, being aware of sheer man-to-man envy of Markie for cutting so much ice.”

    “When I put cups and saucers away in the office cupboard, it feels as though they had flown there;…”

    As with Emmeline’s office cupboard, I sense Bowen’s leitmotifs in my head likewise.

    “I [Julian] feel speechless as though I were pulling one foot out after the other across a bog.”

    “I don’t think these are my thoughts.”

    “…words twist everything; what one agrees about can’t be spoken. To talk is always to quarrel a little, or misunderstand.”

    “For a moment he did not answer. Then: ‘You do know,’ he said, ‘that I want to marry Cecilia?’
    ‘Yes – I do hope she will.’
    ‘There seems no reason why she should. But Emmeline, if – in the remotest eventuality – what would become of you?’
    ‘What,’ she said rather wildly, ‘ever becomes of anyone?’”

    My reference to a pent-up volcano in the previous entry above now bears full fruition, I guess.

  4. A lot of Bowenesque half-measures, and slow motion feeding of our awareness of Emmeline’s travel business with Peter Lewis, a man thought to be too Peterish! He feared he left the travel office unlocked – and he was right! When I feel anxiety at having left a place unlocked, I am always wrong. —From my review of Chapter IV above.

    XXIV

    “‘I believe,’ said Emmeline, ‘we forgot to lock up the cottage.’ “

    A sense of absurdism in this chapter is left deliberately on the latch — as Stella did when waiting for Harrison’s visit near the start of Heat of the Day?

    Here, I wish I had already mentioned Daisy as another major minor-character as she stirs Stendhal’s sense of jealousy in Emmeline, when the latter senses our awareness already of last night’s visit by Daisy to the house with the lift that Markie shares with his sororal Dolman… a visit that starts a telephone squabble, between storeys, by the siblings!
    Meantime, M and E are staying at Connie Pleach’s cottage (did not E earlier tell Cecilia that she was going to stay with Connie herself, not go there with M?)
    When C’s telegram arrives at the cottage, we learn more about the jealousy radiating within this rhombus of characters, each of each, without the need of someone called Daisy to make it a pentagon!

    “A great gilt harp, one of Connie’s heirlooms she could not house in her basement flat, effectively blocked the wall-cupboard beside the grate. A red Recamier couch shed stuffing;”

    “Shadows edgeless and soft in the flooding mild light rolled over the face of the downs; close by the window three hollyhocks bore up their spikes of red frilly flowers. Leaning out over the warm sill, Emmeline touched a hollyhock. ‘I say, Markie,’ she called in a minute, ‘there aren’t any stairs.’”

    They were in the cupboard.
    Cf the cupboard in my previous entry above!

    “…he [Markie] had lugged the suitcases over the bumpy threshold with a dreamlike malicious pleasure, as though he were to hear of this happening to someone else …”

    “‘Never mind.’ They returned to the parlour, where Emmeline, kneeling, began to puff at the twigs with some wheezy bellows. White ash raced round the hearth; up the chimney Emmeline saw a small patch of sky. Though she discouraged the fire, her air was a wordless magnificat.”

    “I’m so tired, Markie; I’d hate to drive any more.’” She is the driver of the car, and she is persuaded by M to get a meal out in Devizes. That’s when they forgot to lock up.
    Meanwhile, before they leave, Markie “roamed round to look amiably at the bookshelves, took out a yellow volume, blew dust from the top and returned with it to the sofa, where he swung his feet up, opened the book at random and read aloud:”
    And he reads aloud, I infer, parts of CHAPTER XXXV of ‘De LAmour’, a chapter entitled: ‘OF JEALOUSY’ — read aloud in the original French! And it is printed in French in this chapter and perhaps this is the first time a translation of it has been given in the context of this book, a translation I have weasled out from the Internet for inclusion as this cottage’s version of WAIKIKI-pedia!…

    When you are in love, as each new object strikes your eye or your
    memory, whether crushed in a gallery and patiently listening to a
    parliamentary debate, or galloping to the relief of an outpost under
    the enemy’s fire, you never fail to add a new perfection to the idea
    you have of your mistress, or discover a new means (which at first
    seems excellent) of winning her love still more.
    Each step the imagination takes is repaid by a moment of sweet delight.
    No wonder that existence, such as this, takes hold of one.
    Directly jealousy comes into existence, this turn of feelings
    continues in itself the same, though the effect it is to produce is
    contrary. Each perfection that you add to the crown of your beloved,
    who now perhaps loves someone else, far from promising you a heavenly
    contentment, thrusts a dagger into your heart. A voice cries out: “This
    enchanting pleasure is for my rival to enjoy.”
    Even the objects which strike you, without producing this effect,
    instead of showing you, as before, a new way of winning her love, cause
    you to see a new advantage for your rival.
    You meet a pretty woman galloping in the park; your rival is famous
    for his fine horses which can do ten miles in fifty minutes.
    In this state, rage is easily fanned into life; you no longer
    remember that in love possession is nothing, enjoyment everything.
    You exaggerate the happiness of your rival, exaggerate the insolence
    happiness produces in him, and you come at last to the limit of
    tortures, that is to say to the extremest unhappiness, poisoned still
    further by a lingering hope.
    The only remedy is, perhaps, to observe your rival’s happiness at close
    quarters. Often you will see him fall peacefully asleep in the same
    salon as the woman, for whom your heart stops beating, —

    …which leads us tellingly to the speed versus slowth theme of this book and of Bowen in general.

    “‘Stendhal crossed the Alps with an army with a valise strapped on to his horse,’ said Emmeline thoughtfully.
    ‘Oh, no doubt,’ said Markie, ‘he could have driven a car.’”

    A slow journey to this cottage over countrified ruts!

    Then the Daisy admission by Markie…

    “Daisy walked on some records and said what a nice flat I’d got.’
    ‘Hadn’t she seen it before?’
    ‘I suppose she’d forgotten.’”

    “‘What did the two men do while she was pathetic?’
    ‘She stayed back while they were starting the car up, to look for her comb.’
    ‘Did she find it?’
    ‘I’ve no idea – no, it’s under my clock.’
    ‘I wish you hadn’t told me,’ Emmeline said suddenly, raising her eyes to his.
    Markie’s eyebrows twitched up. ‘What,’ he said, ‘about Daisy stopping?’
    Scarlet at the misapprehension, she said quickly: ‘About her at all.’”

    “The other night, what did you mean by the Alps?”

    Come back Sunday must talk very urgent indeed – Cecilia. 
    Emmeline said: ‘She’s going to marry Julian.’ She stared at the post-office writing, so unlike Cecilia’s, while something slid down in her like a dead weight. Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits, as small houses are broken up daily to widen the roar of London. She saw the door open on emptiness: blanched walls as though after a fire. Houses shared with women are built on sand. She thought: ‘My home, my home.’”

    “; those half-shadows behind their talk at Devizes mounting up in him in an impatience ravaging and intense. Damning the bridal Cecilia, he crumpled the paper and threw it into a corner: had they not come here to be alone?”

    Did I need all that detail above to summon up such priceless literary absurdism?

  5. XXV

    “Yesterday’s unborn pleasure, today’s might-have-been hung about the cottage, picking out the harp, the hearth and the pictures in lines of agony,…”

    E v M, still at the cottage panning out in cross purposes of leaving or staying, and vice versa. 

    E v C, now back home, the Stendhal jealousies magnified, any guilt redoubled, a perfect short chapter …

    “First Henry, then you, now Julian.”

    Thus, C has more guilt than happiness…

    Then, E rings M at his home, then Mrs D his sister in the same home of such separation, and Mrs D puts E onto Daisy’s place.
    It all fits INTO place, with sadness and a loss of absurdism as a consolation prize. 

    All such minor characters come back into the pattern of gestalt as potential hoppiness and / or potential sadness, both now without comedy.

    …Except in this chapter we are reminded of another major minor-character…
    “Benito appeared from nowhere and ran round her feet.”
    Wasn’t he also know as Beelzebub?

  6. XXVI

    This chapter is a horror story by Bowen worthy of the author of DEMON LOVER. That happiness-sadness mixtape, though, alongside an absurdism from Pauline’s letter, a letter from her and Dorothea otherwise mainly congratulating Cecilia for her engagement to Uncle Julian….
    “You will be pleased to hear that Dorothea and I got ‘Highly commended’ for our garden. If a rabbit had not got in and eaten some of the annuals we might have got the prize,…”

    And Lady W is later seen meddling darkly, bringing up Henry in the context of C’s responsibility to E, the E whose travel firm is literally going through a sort of hell in her head, via the auspices of the new secretary that ousted her Tripp.

    “Emmeline walked the roads of St John’s Wood or up to Hampstead, quickly, her hands in her pockets. Wet or fine, when rain drew the lamplight out into long reflections, or moths from the sycamores whirled in brown air round the lamps, she walked late; pulling up vaguely at corners or stopping to stare over garden walls.”

    “She sat staring at bottles of coloured ink in the pigeon-holes, or turned over dully the letters put out for her to sign: once she signed something she had not read.”

    “Everything passed through their secretary’s hands; she had tentacles everywhere; without her, these days, they did not know what they were trying to do.”

    A secretary created by Bowen. An Armitage as a byword for elbow?

    “…holidays became just one thing more to be undertaken, this end of a gruelling summer.”

    Holidays we shall never take again? Staycations Limited, too.

    “Broken up like a puzzle the glittering summer lay scattered over her mind, cut into shapes of pain that had no other character.”

    Another puzzle for Portia later to solve? Or issue?
    The vicar dead, gone away never to become Rip Van Winkle, but simply plain RIP.

    “Mr Lewis, however, is quite a minor point.”

  7. XXVII

    “He [M] disliked this idea of Cecilia’s, suspecting behind it some shadow of Lady Waters, and had opposed it.”

    A morphed, lying shadow, as it turns out, as C (with J) invites M and E together for an archetypal party, more archetypal than Cinderella, E in a silver dress, M reluctant, and yet the chapter ends with their leaving together in E’s car, after E’s brush with Benito. A car with no further ruts to cross, while a ‘plane rustles’.

    The invitation to E….

    “‘Then,’ said Cecilia, rallying, ‘you really are being foolish. You’re making mountains, beloved. Surely poor Markie’s not worth all that.’
    ‘Mountains?’ repeated Emmeline, struck by the word. ‘Yes, I do think mountains. You’re certain to have to meet him sometime and somewhere: why not happily here?”

    “For a moment she thought she saw in Emmeline’s eyes a wandering icy gentleness like insanity’s, gentleness with no object. But this was as in a dream.”

    *

    “The drawing-room, heavy and cool in late light with white Chinese peonies, the dining-room, pointed expectant glitter on lakes of polish, reflected her animation.”

    “The clock-hands crept round: though Markie did not arrive he was still not late.”

    C first met M in Switzerland on a train. Remember? Where the Alps are!
    Where did they all first meet? 

    “Julian said to Cecilia: ‘I wish I’d met you in a train.’
    Dropping her voice she said: ‘Why?’ – one of those questions between happy lovers that are never answered but float into speculation.”

    “Markie’s quick look, sidelong, examined her [Emmeline’s] fingers’ movement about the stem of the wineglass, ran up her bare arm…”

    *

    “Were she dead, she could not have come from farther away.”

  8. XXVIII

    “‘We’re going north.’ The cold pole’s first magnetism began to tighten upon them…”

    One of those chapters in literature you will never forget. But amazingly I had forgotten it! — and it came up anew, with its full force. Towards earlier magnetic north as the ‘Macabre North’ — a pair of words already embedded somewhere in an earlier chapter. The journey north, with M in E’s car, towards where M’s Daisy lives, I guess — all couched in a truly deadly Bowenesque to outdo any horror writer or transcendent writer; even Aickman is squeezed between the crossover or crossdressage of speeds in a car alongside the aloof woods or the aloof clouds of flying from an aerodrome, this time Hendon, not Croydon, toward, I sense, a Mysterious Kôr.

    There are passages in this final chapter that reach beyond where any other words have reached. Read them and see. Especially the passages I do NOT quote as a few examples below…

    “Petrol pumps red and yellow, veins of all speed and dangerous, leapt giant into their lights.”

    “…his fingers, jumping and burning with fresh excitement, tighten about her tense cold wrist as she drove. ‘Mind,’ said Emmeline calmly. ‘How can I drive?’”

    “a deep lake of darkness: the aerodrome.”

    “My heart sank, I don’t mind telling you, Emmeline. I agree it’s the devil; it may be a pity we ever met. We may be each other’s bad luck, but luck sticks, you know. First you thought too much of me, now you don’t trust me an inch, and you’re right. But here I still am. And you’re something I can’t get past. In a sense, I’m done for.”

    “‘As you feel,’ he said and stared at the two lit dials: the clock, the speedometer.”

    “Friendly darkness, as over a pillow, and silence in which a clock striking still pinned her to time hung trancelike…”

    The Trance of reading Elbow.

    Balanced between life and death, Null Immortalis.

    And thankfully it all ended with unmixed happiness.

    *

    “There seems to be no truth anywhere. Even our servants lie.”

    end

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